Bruce Willis

To any human being with an action movie pulse, Bruce Willis will forever be known as John McClane, the wisecracking and seemingly indestructible hero of the Die Hard series. Besides Die Hard, Willis often has a habit of popping up (and delivering solid performances) in movies with impeccable pop culture relevance, whether they be Pulp Fiction, Sin City, The Sixth Sense, The Expendables, or even Beavis and Butt-Head Do America. A movie star, an Emmy-winning TV actor (on Moonlighting and Friends), a musician, and a popular recurring guest on The Late Show with David Letterman, Bruce Willis has yet to wear out his pop culture welcome, and his many fans continue to embrace his cinematic and television appearances with open arms.

Appeal

Bruce Willis may be bald and over 50, but he can still give any 20-something thick-haired hot shot a run for his money when it comes to attracting women. To women, he's a manly, macho and charismatic figure. To men, he's the manly, macho and charismatic figure that they would all like to be. A 2008 selection by People as one of its Sexiest Men Alive, Bruce Willis is high on the idea that his age is not indicative of his physical and emotional well-being, both of which are awesome.

From a relationship standpoint, entertainment observers have long associated Bruce Willis with Demi Moore since their marriage in 1987. As one of the bigger power couples in Hollywood, their union produced three daughters, including actress Rumer Willis, but the couple called it quits in 2000. Since then, Demi Moore has moved on to Twitter king Ashton Kutcher, while Willis later became engaged to model-actress Brooke Burns. After that fell through, he married model Emma Hemming in 2009, and remains open to the idea of adding to his family.

Success

If Bruce Willis had only the Die Hard franchise to hang his career hat on, it would be a mammoth achievement unto itself. Carrying a No. 46 ranking in Premiere's list of the Top 100 Movie Characters of All-Time, John McClane continues to be an action hero that resonates with men around the world. Through his permanent association with the character, Willis has left his own stamp on action movie culture while also giving himself a reliable movie meal ticket to come back to… you know, like when he makes duds like Hudson Hawk, Striking Distance, Color of Night, and Surrogates.

Collectively, the movies of Bruce Willis have grossed upwards of $3 billion dollars, making him among the top 10 most bankable stars in Hollywood. For a guy who started in bartending and detective work, his rise to the top is the kind of story that keeps other New York City bartenders inspired by the prospect of action movie stardom.

While the previously mentioned movie duds are unfortunate blips on the career radar of Bruce Willis, he's a lot more versatile than his Die Hard persona may suggest. His Emmy Award-winning turn on Moonlighting, for example, is far removed from the troubled characters he played in Pulp Fiction, Twelve Monkeys and Sin City. As Willis moves forward into new action movie ground with The Expendables and Red, he'll no doubt continue his lucrative ways while keeping audiences primed to see the next crazy adventure of John McClane.

Bruce Willis Biography

Because of his father's employment with the American military, Bruce Willis spent the first few years of his life in West Germany before the family moved to New Jersey in 1957. Having developed a stutter during childhood that caused him insecurity, Willis realized in high school that he could use acting and stage performance to overcome it. Through his increased confidence came a dual interest in politics and a successful election as the president of the Penns Grove High School student council. Any political aspirations went out the window when the young president received a three-month suspension for smoking marijuana.

Following his high school graduation, Bruce Willis began a series of short-lived, colorful working-class jobs, which included stints as a security guard and a private investigator. The drama of the jobs inspired him to pursue acting at a more serious level. He chose Montclair State University and acted in school productions of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Feeling that he needed raw acting experience over education, Bruce Willis high-tailed it to New York City, where he bartended while seeking out auditions. Paying gigs for off-Broadway plays Heaven and Earth and Fool for Love, and a Levi's ad offered some encouragement, as did small roles in films like the 1980 Frank Sinatra vehicle, The First Deadly Sin, and the 1982 Paul Newman courtroom drama, The Verdict.

bruce willis stars in moonlighting and die hard

On the idea that television might be a better match for his skills, Bruce Willis ventured to Los Angeles to audition for roles. He came out swinging and connected with guest spots on Miami Vice and The Twilight Zone before beating out 3,000 other actors to land the part of private detective David Addison Jr. on Moonlighting in 1985. While the on-set disagreements between Bruce Willis and costar Cybill Shepherd were legendary, their show was a ratings winner that won Bruce Willis an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama and earned him a ticket to lead roles on the big screen in Blind Date (with Kim Basinger) and Sunset.

In 1988, Bruce Willis was cast in Die Hard in his career-defining role. As John McClane, the New York cop who finds himself in a skyscraper controlled by terrorists, he saved the day while providing a series of ad-libbed wisecracks. The box office smash reshaped the action genre, spawning a number of rehashes (Under Siege with Steven Seagal, Speed with Keanu Reeves) and an explosive sequel in 1990.

With the success of the Die Hard movies also came some embarrassing flops in the form of the all-star comedy disappointment, The Bonfire of the Vanities (with Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith and Kim Cattrall), the suspense dud The Last Boy Scout (with Halle Berry) and Hudson Hawk, an ill-advised action-comedy that Bruce Willis cowrote. Hawk was deemed to be so bad that it easily won that year's Golden Raspberry Awards for Worst Picture, Worst Director and Worst Screenplay.

bruce willis in pulp fiction and the sixth sense

In 1994, Bruce Willis experienced a career turning point when Quentin Tarantino hired him to play troubled boxer Butch in Pulp Fiction. Besides serving as a comeback vehicle du jour for John Travolta, Pulp Fiction did the same thing for Bruce Willis by showing his acting versatility and re-establishing his pop culture relevance. A third go-around as John McClane in 1995's Die Hardwith a Vengeance was also hugely successful and later that year, his subdued turn as a time-traveling convict in Twelve Monkeys (opposite a crazy and googly-eyed Brad Pitt) received much critical praise.

After the collective box office disappointments of The Jackal, Mercury Rising and Breakfast of Champions, Bruce Willis stormed back in Michael Bay's 1998 sci-fi summer blockbuster Armageddon, where he led a group of ragtag oil drillers on a mission to save mankind from the wrath of an impending comet.

Just a year later, Bruce Willis was front and center again as a shrink in The Sixth Sense, the 1999 summer thriller that brought the phrase "I see dead people" into pop culture immortality. The actor also made an inspired return to television as a protective dad on Friends, a guest spot that won him another Emmy Award. He also made a friend in Matthew Perry, who later costarred with him in the hit comedy, The Whole Nine Yards.

bruce willis in live free or die hard and the expendables

Upon reuniting with his Sixth Sense director M. Night Shyamalan and Die Hard with a Vengeance costar Samuel L. Jackson for Unbreakable, Bruce Willis soldiered on through a number of war-themed films like Hart's War and Tears of the Sun before finding a filmmaking ally in director Robert Rodriguez. Rodriguez cast him in 2005's Sin City as an honest cop with a life-threatening heart condition who is at war with a family of creeps. The success of their collaboration led to Willis being cast in a supporting role as a military man in the Robert Rodriguez Planet Terror segment of 2007's Grindhouse.

In the summer of 2007, Bruce Willis slipped back into the comfortable shoes of John McClane once again for the action hit, Live Free or Die Hard -- only this time he was saddled with Justin Long as a sidekick and Kevin Smith as a basement-dwelling computer geek. Like the other Die Hard films, this one was a big success and after working under the directorial lens of Kevin Smith for the 2010 buddy comedy, Cop Out, Willis returned to the action genre with a supporting role in Sylvester Stallone's action opus, The Expendables. From there, he went on to star in Red, yet another action film, and the crime drama, Catch .44.